Isi Metzstein – Life During The War

In this short section Isi Metzstein discusses how far he felt that he was (and was treated as) a foreigner when he lived in Britain during the war

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INT: And did you feel foreign at that time? Because the war was going on, was it uncomfortable to be German?

IM: Actually not really. It was at the one stage but I was quite young of course. If I’d been older it would be probably quite uncomfortable because they found it difficult to distinguish between Germans and Germans if you know what I mean? But some of them were German. I never felt German.

My parents had only lived in Berlin maybe about 10 years when I was born and left… My father died of course in 1933; all the people we mixed with in Germany were Polish and immigrants. So we didn’t really have a German culture. I went to a Jewish school, you know, that sort of thing